1000 budget for speakers and integrated - HELP

The AR Complete is the way to go on the amp side. As stated, it may hurt the budget for speakers. You are on target with the Kestrels, but to make the budget work and still keep that Meadowlark magic, try the Vireos. The Vireo is perfect for the music you mentioned and you may just make it at 1000.

Most are missing $1000 for the two. If you are listening to acoustic, there is no better transducer than a ribbon speaker. Wonderful Apogee ribbon hybrids are available for as little as five hundred dollars and Jolida tube amps can be had for around the same. Just like there is no beating ribbons for natural sound, tubes hold musical sway over any solid state in the below $1000 dollar range. You go this way and you will have a better sounding system than any of your friends in the sub $3000 level.

I appologize for breaking in on this thread. My old advent legacy speakers have died and I need some new (probably used) ones. How would people compare the soliloquy 5.3, the vandersteen 2ce signature, the opera super pavarotti, and the ohm walsh 100 series? As you can tell from some of these, the "WAF" is a consideration here. I am an old geezer who mostly listens to classical, jazz, acoustic and chicago blues, latin, world beat, etc. I guess basically anything but hard rock and rap. I would like to keep using my ancient onkyo tx84 amp to power these speakers in a smallish (13 x 20 ft) room. Any help and advice greatly appreciated.

A good $300 speaker is the Tannoy Mercury? You can get them on ebay for $260 with "buy it now" feature. That and the Complete should do the trick.

Also, I highly recommend the older TA series nakamichi receivers. They are Threshold-esque statis topology designed amps with tuner and preamp in one chassis. You can get them for about $400 for the 100 wpc version.

Viggen's answer concerning the Tannoy Mercury is interesting . . . I have recently found a pair in a rubbish bin. One tweeter was duff but the other speaker sounded superb. Very smooth and silky. But before buying another tweeter, for the hell of it, I put in a Lowther PM6, slightly enlarging the 8inch hole in places to take it. I wired it direct, no crossover, and . . . the result was amazing. Far from listening to recorded music as "the HiFi sound", suddenly the performers and the performance appeared in front of you. There is a quantum leap in the listening experience, the realism, between these good speakers and such boxes with a full range Lowther drive unit.

Typically, if you listen to classical music, harpsichords are lost in the crossovers. If you use a pair of Lowther units, you'll suddenly discover instruments that you never heard before.

Yours sincerely

David Pinnegar